The Canadian Military Journalism Course Part 1

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The Canadian Military Journalism Course Part 1

This year has been pretty good to me. I can happily say that. Capping off a year of good grades and an awesome internship, I was also offered a scholarship to Calgary for a 10-day journalism course learning about the Canadian Forces.

If anyone knows me and has seen what I have done, you’d probably think that it’s pretty random for an Asian chick who loves movies and pop culture to do something like this. But the truth is, I am constantly trying to learn new things even if something doesn’t fit into my niche. So in order to achieve that, I tried my hand at the military.

I was first drawn to take this course after a reporter named Colin Perkel of The Canadian Press came in to speak to my photojournalism class. Having traveled to Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay as a foreign correspondent, it was not long for me to admire his body of work as he shared his stories and experiences with the class. Telling us that he had to file through various mediums like print, broadcast, radio and photography was also something that fascinated me. As I consider myself a fairly independent person, I was inspired by all the things he was able to do with just a couple of resources by his side.

In addition to that, I had started growing more interested in my cousin’s job (he’s a reservist). Therefore feeling like this was an amazing opportunity, I decided to apply.

That being said, the first day was filled with traveling and spending the majority of my time at the airport. But when I finally arrived, there was a very nice cocktail party at the University of Calgary waiting for all of us.

Having this little event was very nice, as it allowed us to converse with people from the military as well as my fellow classmates for the next ten days. In fact, many of my colleagues were coming from journalism schools across the country including Carleton, the University of British Columbia and Kings College. Ryerson however, had the most students (four, in fact) and I was already friends with one of them.

But as fun as the party was, it fizzled pretty quickly as we were heading to CFB Wainwright the next day. What we did do afterwards was have a Game of Thrones party, which a couple of my friends and I have decided to carry on once we get back to Toronto.